Semiconductor devices are used in a variety of electronic applications, such as computers, cellular phones, personal computing devices, and many other applications. Home, industrial, and automotive devices that in the past comprised only mechanical components now have electronic parts that require semiconductor devices, for example.
Semiconductor devices are manufactured by depositing many different types of material layers over a semiconductor workpiece or wafer, and patterning the various material layers using lithography. The material layers typically comprise thin films of conductive, semiconductive, and insulating materials that are patterned and etched to form integrated circuits (ICs). There may be a plurality of transistors, memory devices, switches, conductive lines, diodes, capacitors, logic circuits, and other electronic components formed on a single die or chip, for example.
After an integrated circuit is manufactured, individual die are singulated from the wafer, and typically, the die is packaged. For many years, the most common way of packaging a die was horizontal placement within individual plastic or ceramic packages. Alternatively, several die may be packaged horizontally in a single package, forming a multi-chip module. Electrical connections are made to terminals or bond pads of the die, e.g., using very small strands of wire, which is routed to pins of the package.
A demand for smaller ICs with higher performance has led to the development of system-on-a-chip devices, where portions of the chip are dedicated to memory and other portions are dedicated to logic or other types of circuitry. However, it can be difficult to manufacture an IC with multiple types of circuitry, due to integration problems of the different circuit fabrication technologies.
One trend in the semiconductor industry is the movement towards three dimensional integrated circuits (3D-ICs), for example, where two or more chips or wafers are stacked and vertically integrated. Parts of a circuit are fabricated on different wafers, and the wafers or die are bonded together with a glue layer such as copper or a polymer based adhesive. Different types of circuits, e.g., memory and logic, as examples, may be manufactured separately and then vertically attached, which may be less expensive and easier to manufacture than combining the two circuit technologies on a single wafer as in system-on-a-chip devices. 3D-ICs are predicted to be used in the future for low power, high speed applications, because the paths of conduction may be shortened by the vertical electrical connections between the circuits, resulting in low power consumption and increased speed.
However, 3D-ICs introduce some design and fabrication challenges. For example, the etch processes required to produce the vertical connections between vertically stacked ICs may be difficult, due to the many different types of material layers and the thickness of the material layers that must be etched.
Thus, improved methods of fabricating 3D-ICs and structures thereof are needed in the art.